With the rapid growth of the mobile phone market, more and more consumers are using their mobile phones for multimedia applications—not only for communications but also for entertainment and information services. Sophisticated mobile applications are becoming the driving power of the mobile phone market. TV-on-Mobile, i.e., watching TV on mobile phones is expected to be a key mobile application in the near future. DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld) is one of the enabling technologies for TV-on-Mobile. Compared to DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial), DVB-H reduces the power consumption and improves mobility. In order to reduce the power consumption, DVB-H adopts a so-called time slicing technology to reduce the power consumption of the terminal. The main idea of time slicing is to use discrete high-speed bursts to carry a service instead of continuous transmission. Therefore the front-end of the terminal only works within a certain burst period and can be powered down until the next burst time arrives. Of course the transmitter of the head-end is working all the time, and it will transmit other signals between two bursts of the same service. At the terminal side, there must be a buffer to store the burst information and regenerate the original bit-rate data streams. For example, usually the burst data rate will be 10 times lower than the constant bit-rate, so it can save 90% power consumption.
When watching TV on mobile phones, users are very likely to use buttons (e.g. channel +/−) to browse all the available TV programs. However, based on the time-slicing mechanism, there will be a longer time delay compared with the traditional analogue TV (about 2-5 seconds depending on the slice structure) during channel switching. The delay is unacceptable especially for TV-on-mobile users, since they are expected to watch TV for short periods of times during different times of the day (e.g. while commuting). This makes fast channel scanning even more important than on an ordinary TV.
WO 2006/031925 discloses a solution to the above-mentioned problem by a method for providing zapping data for one or more programs transmitted using time slicing. The zapping data may be provided by a zapping data provider or server, or may be created at the mobile terminal based on received program information. With this method the change or zapping time between services may be reduced to an acceptable level for the user i.e. 1 second or less. However, this method has the disadvantage that zapping data has to be generated at the transmitting side. At the receiving side zapping data has to be received and/or processed, which requires power used from the limited battery. At the transmitting side the zapping data cannot be tailored to the specific user preferences without straining the available transmission capability unnecessarily and thereby lowering the frequency spectrum efficiency. Thus, the solution complicates the transmission of services and does not provide the user with the familiar zapping experience between services in for example a traditional analogue TV as zapping data is typically a static picture.
Hence, an improved method for changing between services would be advantageous, and in particular a more efficient and/or reliable method would be advantageous.